The Sinbad Cyclops: A recreation

Here's a record for me: The longest I've ever taken to finish a puppet! And one made for a client to boot. I started building this puppet in 2011 and just finished it a couple of weeks ago.
Any die hard stop-motion fan can see that this is a recreation of Ray Harryhausen's perhaps most famous puppet character; the cyclops from "7th Voyage of Sinbad". Making accurate recreations is NOT my best talent, but I hope I got most of the details right. This will be the last job I undertake of this sort. I much more enjoy creating original, if derivative, characters.

I've already made two posts about this project some years earlier, but I'll try to summarise what I've talked about before. The cyclops started life as a chavant clay bust. This was the part of the puppet I felt I needed to have the biggest control over, while the rest could be built up using my preferred construction techniques.

This puppet, like most of my puppets, is built up using layers of soft polyurethane foam covered with bits of latex skin. The hooves are cast in SmoothCast plastic from a silicone mould of a clay sculpture. Apparently I never took a photo of the armature, but it's my usual aluminum/Friendly Plastic concoction. The eye is a plastic ball with a Photoshopped iris printed on paper and glued to the ball. The eyeball was dipped in Crystal Clear casting resin and hung upside down to set, and create a transparent lens over the iris.

The finished cyclops, with fake fur for its legs, latex teeth and claws, and a latex/cotton club built up over a piece of wooden dowel. The horn is built up with melted white Friendly Plastic. A light paint job of drybrushed PAX paint guilds the lily. The plan is to send the cyclops off to his new master before Christmas.

Puppets by Request: The Cyclops

A bit more progress on the "7th Voyage of Sinbad" cyclops I'm building for a guy in the US. As life is keeping me busy with all sorts of fun surprises, finishing something at all this year is taking a lot of time.

I have some patching up to do, teeth and claws to add, some paint and the fur on the legs. And I'll have to make him a big, spiky club, of course.

Puppets by Request: Kong and the Cyclops

I am asked more and more often to make puppets for other animators, which is fun, but also steals time from my own projects. At the same time it's interesting to try and recreate the look of classic movie monsters. It's a lot harder than I initially thought.
Right now I'm working on a on a King King puppet, which will be just under a foot tall. As you may know, that is smaller than the original 1933 puppet by Marcel Delgado. The client sent me a ball and socket armature that he used for another puppet a while back. I modified this armature and will be using it for Kong.

I've done two face sculptures; One slightly rounded, which is the one I've picked for this armature, and one slightly elongated and a bit bigger. Right now the head I prefer has red "eyes". I touched them up in a few images to get a better look at what they might look like finished. Also, the teeth are just put there for a quick look.

 Also, you might recognize this fellow, which is being made for another client:

Again, the teeth are just there for show at the moment, and the eye will, of course, be replaced with a realistic one.

Recommended reading!

I went to London a couple of weekends ago and visited the Forbidden Planet Megastore. Maybe not the cheapest place on Earth to go shopping, but certainly one of the coolest. I actually didn't know what to spend my money on, since I didn't have that much to spend. Until I found this book, that is.

For those of us who enjoy and practice animation, Ray Harryhausen is God, pure and simple. He has arguably done more for stop-motion animation and the developement of special effects than any man alive. And he is still alive, thank goodness, though he is now in his eighties. This is the fourth book he's written and the third with Tony Dalton. Now, if you have only even a slight interest in animation, this book is required reading, for it goes into the history of the art of three dimensional animation quite deeply. And it's shockful of images.

My London-based animation and model-making buddy Roger Todd informed me that Harryhausen (himself a London resident) was going to appear at said store the weekend after I had been there to sign this book. Which is probably as close to actually meeting by big hero as I'll ever come. But Roger generously offered to buy me a copy to have it signed. I declined, since I already have a signed copy of Harryhausen's book "An Animated Life" and a signed photo of him with the puppets from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. But I did write him a letter, which Roger printed out and delivered to the great man. So I'm happy anyway!